The subject matter herein relates generally to laser direct structuring (LDS) liners and methods of manufacturing LDS liners.
Internal antennas and conductive traces are used in electronic devices, such as mobile wireless devices including phones, laptops, and the like. The internal antennas or conductive traces can be integrated with a housing of the mobile wireless device. The antennas can be designed to cover various radio frequency (RF) bands for communication protocols, such as but not limited to the LTE (Long Term Evolution), GSM (Global System for Mobile) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) cellular bands or Wi-Fi bands widely used in mobile phones and laptops.
Electronic devices are continuously becoming smaller, more compact, and more complex. Such changes can result in issues with electrical connectivity, manufacturing, and assembly. Producing antennas and conductive traces capable of operation on or with such electronic devices is, thus, becoming more difficult and/or more costly. In order to obtain the desired space for the integrated antenna and still keep the total product size small it is desirable to place the antenna or other conductive traces on the housing of the wireless device. This can be achieved with an antenna or conductive trace that is formed in a three dimensional (3D) shape fitting to the contours of the inside of the housing. Such structures are primarily realized by flexible circuit print (FCP) antennas, metal sheet antennas, and Laser Direct Structure (LDS) antennas. Other processes for producing such structures include screen printing, flexographic techniques, gravure-printing, spin-coating, and dip-coating. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses. Such processes may suffer from drawbacks of being limited to specific and/or simple geometries (for example, planar geometries), being very time consuming to achieve desired thicknesses, and being costly, due to the time-consuming production aspects.
LDS processes produce LDS parts having complex shapes and contours that may match the interior of the housing of the electronic device. Such LDS processes use a composite loaded with a laser-activated precursor that acts as a seed layer for selective plating. The composite can be molded into almost any shape, including three dimensional (3D) shapes. For example, the composite is manufactured into small particles that are injected into a mold. However, due to molding limitations, the LDS parts are limited in how thin such parts can be manufactured. For example, conventional 3D molded LDS manufacturing processes yield parts that have a minimum thickness of approximately 1.0 mm. The size of the particles, mechanical constraints and the molded LDS manufacturing processes do not allow manufacturing thinner molded parts.
A need remains for a process that is compatible with manufacturing thinner parts and reduce the space in the housing occupied by the LDS part.